Upgrading ED-E and my Xbox 360 in time for Fallout 4

It’s crazy to write this, but Fallout 4 comes out this week. I’m under no embargo, so I can totally say that out loud without fear of retribution. In fact, on Wednesday, I’ll be joining the next generation of gamers–a.k.a. the current gen–with an Xbox One and a retail copy of Bethesda’s post-apocalyptic take on Boston. Yeah, I know the game releases to the public a day prior, but my bundle won’t arrive until Hump Day. That all said, I’m totes excited.

I fired up Fallout: New Vegas over the weekend because the reality is this: once I can deep-dive into Fallout 4, it’s going to be hard to return to any of the prior games. That’s fine when it comes to Fallout 3 because I saw and did nearly everything possible, but there’s still a handful of things to do and Achievements to pop left in Fallout: New Vegas, and it seems like I haven’t touched my console copy of the game in about three years. A couple of them still seem too much for my waning heart, like completing an entire run on the “hardcore” difficulty or getting banned from all the strip’s casinos. However, I noticed that there were two left unpopped from the Deathclaw- and radiation-heavy DLC Lonesome Road. Hmm. Off to the Divide!

My first focus was on upgrading everyone’s favorite floating eye-bot equipped with battle theme music ED-E with all five performance enhancements. I guess I missed one or two the only other time I played the DLC, which meant I opted to have a guide open next to me as I both meandered through the irradiated land and listened to Dave Lang coin future Giant Bomb phrases like “get monked” during his Extra Life 2015 stream. I was able to get four of the five upgrades for ED-E, which do stick in the robot permanently when you return to the Mojave Desert, but one required a Science skill level of 75 or up to hack a terminal and open a locked door. I’m guessing I didn’t have the skill high enough before. Well, as luck has it, I did not have a great Science skill with this character either, so I grinded out some XP and used a magazine to hit 75 on the dot. Check it out:

ED-Ecated (20G): Find all of ED-E’s upgrades in the Divide.

The other Achievement that I was juggling progress towards as I outfitted ED-E for the future is Warhead Hunter, which tasks the Courier with detonating all of the warheads in the Divide. There are thirty in total, and by the time I had spoken Ulysses down from unnecessary violence–thank you, 100 Speech skill level–I had twenty-four taken care of. Then I hit up the Courier’s Mile for two more, which is a really tough section full of radiation and Deathclaws; I kind of zipped in, used the laser detonator, and got out faster than you can say wasteland omelet. That means I have four left, and I’m not sure exactly where they are, nor do I feel like retracing every step I took to unearth them. Kind of a bummer, but my fault for not following a step-by-step guide.

If anything, this brief return to Fallout: New Vegas has reminded me of what I’d like to see greatly improved in Fallout 4. Combat can still be chaotic and clunky, and sometimes you can mash on the Pip-Boy button only for your character to never bring it up, leaving you open to the deadly swipe of a Deathclaw. The menus themselves continue to be a struggle to get through. That standard Bethesda jank will never go away, seeing as I had enemies doing cartwheels through walls during slow-mo V.A.T.S. moments, but I’d like to see less of it on an enhanced engine.

Considering my Xbox One bundle comes with a digital version of a backwards compatible version of Fallout 3, there’s hope down the road of Fallout: New Vegas also getting the same treatment. If so, cool. Perhaps by then I might be in the mood to return to Brown Town and finish up the remaining six Achievements. Until then, I have Fallout 4‘s ruined Boston to explore, which is doubly interesting to me seeing as I visited the real-life city back in August and expect to recognize several locations. Hopefully one of them is the fake Cheers bar. It’s gonna be wicked.

Y’know, that Alpha Male Deathclaw glitch

I’m going to be talking about a spectacular glitch from Fallout: New Vegas today, one so amazing in its horribleness and mind-fuckery that I had planned to draw a journal comic about it, but my wife beat me to the punch, which is fine as it’s a great l’il comic that captured the infamous event perfectly:

Click for a bigger version, yo. And yeah, I like to sit on the floor when I play. Wanna make something of it?

Right. Glitches and Fallout: New Vegas. I just can’t seem to escape writing about ’em. And this one’s a doozy. I was just beginning to scope out the landscape with Rhaegar, my fourth playthrough character, trying to locate some of the more pertinent locations so that they would be ready for fast-traveling. Leaving Goodsprings, I headed out towards Sloan because I knew that I could at least get a few snippets of EXP from fixing one of the generators and healing Snuffle’s injuries. What, you don’t know who Snuffles is? Why, she’s Sloan’s personal mole rat, a friendly one too. As I crept closer, I noticed the [hidden] status changing to [caution] and then [danger] despite no enemies being nearby at all. The status continued to change back and forth, too. Very bewildering. I headed into one of the shacks in Sloan to ask about how to make Deathclaw omelets, hoping to nip this weird status glitch in the butt. Nope, so I headed back outside…

…to discover, to my and Snuffle’s horror, that an Alpha Male Deathclaw, probably the toughest enemy in all of Fallout: New Vegas, had spawned directly in the middle of Sloan. Now that blinking [danger] status made sense. With one swipe, it murdered Snuffles and then took Rhaegar down. The game loaded up with my latest auto-save, which was me exiting the building, and the Deathclaw still spawned. Rinse and repeat. The third time, I turned 180 degrees, and went back inside the building, praying nothing followed me–nothing did. Carefully, cautiously, I went back outside. The Deathclaw was gone, my status stated I was safely [hidden], and all was quiet. Too quiet. No sniffling sound, and that’s when I saw her, Snuffles, slumped over, unmoving, unmovable. The Alpha Male Deathclaw glitch had left its mark for certain. I made a bee-line for Novac and haven’t gone back to Sloan yet. Probably never will.

Last night, Boone found himself trapped inside a bunch of desks in Vault 3 for too long, switching between melee and ranged weapons with strange determination. A funny glitch, but not as harrowing as the Alpha Male Deathclaw one. We’ll see how many more pop up as I continue to hunt for those few remaining Achievements…

The best road to progress is the Lonesome Road in Fallout: New Vegas

It was with great excitement and muted sadness that I purchased Lonesome Road last night, downloaded it, and then loaded up my character Kapture, a creepy man sitting pretty at level 34 that loves his Energy weapons. This hardened weirdo has conquered the Mojave, visited a grand casino, met the Burned Man, and obliterated a bunch of crazy brain-obsessed robots. And now, he has one more adventure, a road, dangerous and unpredictable, riddled with bombs and monsters, and he must walk it alone to find the answers of his past.

I played for about two hours or so last night, and it was a good time. Fun new weapons and the wonderful gift of a newish companion. A little scary, a little too much talking, and a little tough in certain parts. And yes, I also died probably nine or ten times, but that’s not my fault. Nobody told me there would be Deathclaws. Anyways, you get a Pip-Boy message, alerting you that a man named Ulysses is looking for you. Supposedly, this is the courier that was originally meant to deliver the Platinum Chip. Seek him out and discover his reasonings for turning the job down. Once in the Divide, you’ll follow a fairly linear path, all while Ulysses talks to you. And he talks a lot. Unfortunately, while the subject is interesting, listening to him is not; he has this slow, odd way of speaking, drawing every word and phrase out longer than it needs to be. There was a ton of chatter in Old World Blues, but the writing was much more surprising there; here, a lot of Ulysses’ thoughts are easy to guess before even picking the dialogue option, and then waiting for him to finish up his dramatic drawl about homes and roads and Old World blah blah blah is like torture.

But yeah, new locales, new weapons, new perks, new items, new recipes, an increase of +5 to the level cap (now sitting mighty at 50), and new enemy types. It’s what one now expects from a DLC pack for the Fallout franchise, and I’m enjoying it so far. I don’t want to rush through it too fast, seeing as it is the final hurrah until Fallout 4 or Fallout: New Jersey. Granted, I still need to do a Hardcore playthrough…

I didn’t realize I was doing this, just finishing the quest The Launch, but here ya go, the first Achievement unlocked in the Lonesome Road DLC:

Condemned to Repeat It (20G): Decided the fate of all the Divide Dwellers

I also learned from our last story-driven DLC that I was pronouncing ED-E wrong in my head. For some reason, I was calling our little trumpeting eyebot eee-dee-eee, not ed-dee. Like Eddie. Turns out, the dude who made him, well…calls him Eddie. I get that now. However, my brain still refuses to get it right. Oh wells.

And now, some random gameplay tips:

• Make sure your lockpicking skill is decent, at least 50+ with some skill magazines to help from time to time. There’s a lot of lockpicking so far.
• Watch out for glitches where Deathclaws randomly appear inside a ruined trailer and smack the skin off your character. It happened to me, and Tara is a witness. She thought it was a dinosaur at first. I then came up with a new song, which I sang all the way through that Deathclaws-infested stretch of road.
• Pack a lot of Rad-X and/or RadAway. Heck, bring along a Radiation Suit just to be safe. The Divide is not a place one wants to take a deep breath and smell the roses.
• Auto-Inject stimpaks are brilliant; pick up every one you can.
• Don’t stand directly in front of a not-yet-detonated nuke and shoot it. DON’T DO IT.

Good luck, fellow Couriers!

Deathclaws are all about death and claws

I played some more Fallout 3 last night, still on my quest to collect the remaining Achievements, with the one for hitting Level 30 as a totally evil lady in sight. Just got to get some more experience, and the best way to rack up some XP is through doing main storyline quests and shooting big baddies like Deathclaws.

Thus, I decided to tackle the Broken Steel missions, which take you through Old Olney, a destroyed little locale brimming with Deathclaws. Before heading out, if you spoke with Vallincourt, you can pick up the Deathclaw control scrambler device; this basically takes any Deathclaw under the Enclave’s control and puts it under yours…so long as you stay within its broadcasting range. Once freed, the Deathclaw will follow you around as a friend until time runs out and they go all explodey like that one kid early on in Battle Royale. This is great and all, but it only works on the Deathclaws enslaved by the Enclave, and actually does the opposite of what I wanted, as the Deathclaw steals XP from me by killing the Enclave soldiers and then blowing itself up. Oh well. Still fun to watch it run off and do your dirty work.

That said, Deathclaws are still the scariest things in Fallout 3. They are menacing, brooding, towering, terrifying, dangerous, and freaky. Plus a slew of other nasty adjectives. They look like devils on steroids and move with surprising agility. And there’s one part in Old Olney that I completely forgot about, wherein a Deathclaw attacked me from behind and scared the living light out of me. It’s kind of like Jurassic Park, Muldoon, and those plotty velociraptors; I’m sneaking down a hallway, totally in stealth, eyes on the prize, a Deathclaw at the end that is sharpening its claws like cooking knives. Then, without warning, my warning turns DETECTED red and I’m slashed from behind by a Deathclaw. I quickly hop into V.A.T.S., but don’t kill it quick enough with my Chinese Assault Rifle, and now the second Deathclaw is on the alert, sandwiching me in the worst sandwich ever: Deathclaw, evil woman, Deathclaw, and no tomato. Not yummy at all.

Had to break out the Alien Blaster (with limited ammo) just to survive. The funny part–if this can be considered funny–is that this same scenario happened more or less during my first playthrough. Guess I just forgot that at one point, there’s two Deathclaws in the same hallway. I promise not to forget during the third playthrough; if I do, maybe I deserve to be turned into shredded flesh-lettuce.

Having not played any previous Fallout games before Fallout 3, I have to wonder if we’ll see any Deathclaws in Fallout: New Vegas. Not too sure of their history and all, and I know that stealthy Super Mutants will most likely be the next enemy to freak me out. Either way, I’ll be glad to get past them in this section of the Broken Steel DLC even though they do offer up some delicious XP.